Harvard Law Journal: Would Banning Firearms reduce Suicide & Murder

[nihil]

http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf

Interesting read. Spoiler, they don't come to the conclusion you would expect ivory tower grads to come to.

 

[TBalls]

The punchline:

Guns are just one among numerous available deadly instru‐
ments. Thus, banning guns cannot reduce the amount of sui‐
cides. Such measures only reduce the number of suicides by
firearms. Suicides committed in other ways increase to make
up the difference. People do not commit suicide because they
have guns available. They kill themselves for reasons they
deem sufficient, and in the absence of firearms they just kill
themselves in some other way.

CONCLUSION

This Article has reviewed a significant amount of evidence
from a wide variety of international sources. Each individual
portion of evidence is subject to cavil—at the very least the
general objection that the persuasiveness of social scientific
evidence cannot remotely approach the persuasiveness of
conclusions in the physical sciences. Nevertheless, the bur‐
den of proof rests on the proponents of the more guns equal
more death and fewer guns equal less death mantra, espe‐
cially since they argue public policy ought to be based on
that mantra.

To bear that burden would at the very least
require showing that a large number of nations with more
guns have more death and that nations that have imposed
stringent gun controls have achieved substantial reductions
in criminal violence (or suicide). But those correlations are
not observed when a large number of nations are compared
across the world.

 

[Takl23]

Very interesting conclusion.


I wonder what the city of Chicago would have to say about this article, you know with that gun control and no one getting shot on a nightly basis.
/sarcasm

 

[Scarecrow]

I'm scarecrow, and I approve this message.

 

[Boris]

That's ****ing genius!!! May be I should apply for a Nobel prize for discovering the color of sky (.... shhh, don't tell anyone that's blue)

Good for them, at least after all this effort they arrive to a common sense conclusion. A little more and they may be useful for something.

 

[June4th]

The whole argument is completely moot. The real story should be how many murders by governments could have been prevented had all the citizens been armed. Individual murders/suicides, while horrible, pales in comparison when governments unleash their wrath against citizens 'without an inch of iron in their hands' (a Chinese expression).

 

[rep308]

moonbats are more likely to be influenced by reports written by fellow moonbats. This report is a good thing.

 

[Boris]

The whole argument is completely moot. The real story should be how many murders by governments could have been prevented had all the citizens been armed. Individual murders/suicides, while horrible, pales in comparison when governments unleash their wrath against citizens 'without an inch of iron in their hands' (a Chinese expression).

you expect too much from Harvard Law, with graduates like Barry, they are more apt to BS skills than actual science.

 

[cekim]

The comment about the observations (very real) in the US that more guns correlate with lower crime rate is an interesting one when you find that it is not always the case internationally.

There are places with high rates of guns per capita with extraordinary crime rates around the world.

My guess is that the marginal effects are overshadowed by the general state of law and order. You cannot impose law and order by gun alone, it is a societal norm (people have to, on balance decide to be civilized), but that the US shows in a place where they have decided to be, higher rates of ownership and carry provide additional reduction in crime.

I didn't see that aspect explored in there (admitted skim) and I can imagine it would be difficult to analyze...

 

[cekim]

you expect too much from Harvard Law, with graduates like Barry, they are more apt to BS skills than actual science.

That institution has a strange mix of affirmative action which creates opportunities for unqualified people as well as extremely stringent admission requirements and internal advancement hurdles for those not able to check a "diversity" box.

So, you get a bifurcated student body of extremely intelligent and highly screened people and then there is the bottom 50% of the class. They are all given equal deference in many cases once they have a degree unfortunately.

Of course, then there is the faculty with the same problem/quality and all of the usual socialist/communist/leftist influence of any academia on crack.

 

[terraformer]

That institution has a strange mix of affirmative action which creates opportunities for unqualified people as well as extremely stringent admission requirements and internal advancement hurdles for those not able to check a "diversity" box.

So, you get a bifurcated student body of extremely intelligent and highly screened people and then there is the bottom 50% of the class. They are all given equal deference in many cases once they have a degree unfortunately.

Of course, then there is the faculty with the same problem/quality and all of the usual socialist/communist/leftist influence of any academia on crack.

I would imagine even the diversity candidates are pretty smart folks exceeding the IQ of most schools in their own right, so this is likely a relative problem.

 

[P-14]

This was also telling on page 12/13:

One reason the extent of gun ownership in a society does not spur the murder rate is that murderers are not spread evenly throughout the population. Analysis of perpetrator studies shows that violent criminals—especially murderers—“almost uniformly have a long history of involvement in criminal behavior.” So it would not appreciably raise violence if all lawabiding, responsible people had firearms because they are not the ones who rape, rob, or murder. By the same token, violent crime would not fall if guns were totally banned to civilians. As the respective examples of Luxembourg and Russia suggest, individuals who commit violent crimes will either find guns despite severe controls or will find other weapons to use.

Startling as the foregoing may seem, it represents the crossnational norm, not some bizarre departure from it. If the mantra “more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death” were true, broad based cross‐national comparisons should show that nations with higher gun ownership per capita consistently have more death. Nations with higher gun ownership rates, however, do not have higher murder or suicide rates than those with lower gun ownership. Indeed many high gun ownership nations have much lower murder rates. Consider, for example, the wide divergence in murder rates among Continental European nations with widely divergent gun ownership rates.

 

[cekim]

I would imagine even the diversity candidates are pretty smart folks exceeding the IQ of most schools in their own right, so this is likely a relative problem.

A question of degrees, to be sure, but if you take the top 10% of virtually any accredited school in this nation, they are going to far exceed the bottom 50% at Harvard. The trouble comes when people assume that a Harvard pedigree precludes incompetence - relative or not.

Further, this deception applies to self-delusion as well.